It seems we can’t find what you’re looking for. Perhaps searching can help.
It seems we can’t find what you’re looking for. Perhaps searching can help.
This is no age for loudvoiced gods like APOLLO
demanding to be set in uppercase; we have no place
for flesh made perfect in polished stone and niched
in the hallway. Life now happens among lost
bus timetables, tax demands, constant fluctuations
in the hub signal – while weak forces chip paint
from the doorframes, spot jampots with mildew,
subject us to the thinning of hair, the progressive
bend of bone. We have little commerce with things
immaculate, unvarying : give us rather the touches
of quantum godlings, their dabs found everywhere
in our brickbuilt houses, signing a unique presence :
theirs is the trefoil sprouting from the back step,
theirs the thread-legged spiders in the stairwell corners,
the groove dragged deep in the wood-block by the daily
bite of the bread-knife, the colours we choose for curtains
and rugs. They watch by us as sparrows squabble
on the bird-feeders; keep company with us by firelight
in the deep trench of winter; are the ideas given sanctuary
under these pinewood eaves which grunt in the night
like living things. We offer them no hosannas, only
unvoiced thanks, an obscure pull toward reverence
at the sight, say, of sunlight that pours through glass
to pin a one-off complex of shadow branches
to the living-room wall – the sumac tree rendered faithfully,
a temporary print delighting us, their temporals.
Gold pomanders crammed with angelica, sandalwood
and camphor; viper paste smeared and vinegar splashed
as specifics against the distemper –
yet the thing would walk in to the manor
on the person of some boy short-cutting
through sheep fields, bearing letters from court :
and either the lord in his slashed doublet
might die or else the messenger – no telling
who’d be first felled by the sweating sickness
and who then follow.
Fast-forward four centuries : a city of millions
where birds are carried alive to market
head-down and pinioned at the ankles ;
where in darkened warehouses merchants sell
polythene sacks of pangolin scales
to be eaten dried and roasted, ashed,
cooked in oil or butter and boy’s urine,
or baked with earth and powdered oyster-shells
as a cure for excessive nervousness, hysterical crying
in children, malarial fever and deafness,
the possession of women
by devils and ogres.
In the week before lockdown, three radio ads
in one taxi ride from home to station :
a new kind of bank account on offer, details
of continental weekend city-breaks
and an excited voice quoting
only six ninety-nine for a bargain
bucket of chicken pieces prepared
with eleven herbs and spices.
We pull up hard at traffic lights : the jolt
swings the amulet
dangling from the driver’s mirror.
From shelved ranks of bananas
I choose just these few
for home, where I’ll relish
their ripeness one by one and
– as others might rake pebbles
into new lines every sunrise –
rearrange the remainder
with the apples in the dish
to preserve a visual balance,
while their giraffe reticulations
spread and blacken by the day.
You no more end a sentence
with the body that began it
than a stone remains immune
to the drip of harmless water :
inbreath, outbreath, the quiet
thump-thump of the pulse
– these things keep you alive
and kill you, ratcheting you
through time. In this world
of casual loveliness, I get
the continual astonishment
that spawned the idea of angels,
beings of pure thought
walking among us even here
in Sainsbury’s, their light
hidden under hoodies – but,
watching mottled moths
melt into beech bark,
or climbing vetch coil
its tendrils round a cane,
the mathematics of unlikelihood
strikes me as miracle enough.
after William Carlos Williams
a glimpse of the welling and unfurling
of what we cannot then have known
it would come to mean / once the days
had notched on a bit and you gamely
took up the pen in spite of misgivings /
to set down facts no-one else in the room
would assent to / swearing so help them
there was no frame to the picture
only some strips of masking tape
holding its corners / no single rose
dropping petals from a long-necked vase /
but a jamjar with some marguerites
shoved in / the scene a painter might
have called interior with painting
and flowers / this wrenching moment
complete with actualité
when you said / what you said / but this
does not make it real or about love
At this point you’ve pretty much had it
with the new world’s always-on buzz,
its parroting ads & the tinselly clutter
of informatics : the soaring Christ’s-eye
view is now anyone’s for thirty quid,
the asking price of a sky-high drone
zoomed up and digitising what voice-
overs call the patchwork of English fields
– beautiful, available, done to death.
You want out into the open, want to plant
your actual feet on the factual streets, to find
a corner in a greasy spoon and jot stuff
in a well-creased notebook with people
all around you : but you are penned in here
with your thoughts and empty A4 sheets,
ignoring the telephone. You sit tight
with your arm draped along the sofa back,
reversing into the yet-to-come and looking
out of the oriel window to the drizzly city
in its dip where lives are kept going
on imaginary money & nips of opiate.
Trains clattering coastwards out of sight
along the valley floor in this textbook
twilight provide all the metaphor you need.
Everything else can hang off that : memories
of your head on fire with desire & alcohol ;
the jewelled green chafer hiding in the heart
of a rose ; red sun in a red sky ; all the times
you lost yourself and found you kind of loved it.